In many online environments, authors write and publish articles about topics of interest, and community members read, comment on, rate and/or share the articles with others. A community member that influences other community members is referred to herein as an “influencer.” In a social network, for example, an influencer may be a user that is connected to many other users and who regularly shares or comments on articles written by others.
Successfully determining which articles, topics, authors and influencers are currently important or popular to a target demographic is extremely important in informing business decisions. For example, marketing to a particular demographic (“targeted marketing”) is more effective if the topics that are most popular to the particular demographic are known. Matching popular authors with popular topics can help create popular articles. Furthermore, selecting influencers that are popular in the target demographic to help disseminate an article may increase the popularity of the article. Currently, tools like website analytics and social media websites alone do not provide sufficient insight to determine or predict which articles, topics, authors, or influencers are popular for a particular demographic.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.